Echoes of Angels Who Won’t Return
by PaolaAdara
Summary: Holding on is perhaps the sincerest form of loyalty, and maybe even love, but there’s always something more to live for when you’re not afraid to let go.


Title: Echoes of Angels Who Won't Return (1/1)

Author: Paola

Disclaimer: _Echoes of Angels Who Won't Return_ is based on characters and situations that belong to Sotsu Agency, Bandai Studios, and TV Asashi (and other production affiliates that have the right of ownership). No money is being made, and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

Considerations: Similarities to other stories/events/passages are purely coincidental unless otherwise cited. References to real company/ies, historical figure/s, and other personality/ies, dead or alive, are purely fictional. Beliefs and points of view found in the story do not necessarily reflect those of the author's.

Timeline: Takes place after Gundam SEED; Gundam SEED Destiny does not happen

Rating: M for language and adult situations

Warning: Non-linear narrative

_**Echoes of Angels Who Won't Return**_

On Wednesday afternoons, Miriallia wears his ring on the third finger of her right hand because she takes a lie-in during these afternoons and there's no work and she's alone in her flat. It's a hobby, like smoking Marlboros instead of Dunhills because Marlboros are something to get addicted to, except smoking is a vice and wearing the ring is not. Not so much at least. And she hasn't had a stick of Marlboro ever anyway.

On such afternoons, she stumbles into the kitchen barefoot, turns on the coffee pot and makes strong coffee that no one drinks. She doesn't like coffee really, but the sun filters through the window just right and strikes the ring on her finger when she scoops coffee grounds into the percolator, and she thinks the twinkle it makes is like no other, especially when it's on her finger while she's making coffee on Wednesday afternoons. For a moment, she debates on recreating the refraction of the light and catching it on film, but she dismisses the thought like every other Wednesday she has ever brushed aside the idea. It's only a perfunctory thought really, like how she re-arranges the stuff on her desk in the office, or how she wears the right sock first before the left, or how she greets the old lady across the yard every Sunday when she retrieves the paper in the morning. She hates the Sunday paper, she decides.

Every day, she finds there are more and more things to hate: her favorite pair of shoes, which isn't her favorite anymore; cats; seven o'clock; and the painting hanging on her living room wall that always manages to be off-kilter overnight even if she's righted it before going to bed. She decides to get rid of them, but the motions are absent. They're parts of life after all, like breathing, like lies, like butterflies and skittles and death and red M&Ms. The cats are not hers to begin with anyway and seven o'clock is impossible to remove from time. And then it becomes another perfunctory thought. Fleetingly, she wonders if the beating of her heart can become cursory, too.

Perhaps she'll buy a pack of Marlboros tomorrow. Just to break the routine.

She takes a shower after making coffee she has no intention of drinking, and the scent of vanilla shampoo affronts her. She hates vanilla starting today, and as she rinses her hair, she forgets that she doesn't like smoking either.

She takes an hour to finish bathing, and the skin on her body is raw from scrubbing and she hates the smell of her hair. But she's clean now and she takes off the ring and returns it in its box, which sits in the center of her vanity table. A black, velvet box against the almond finish. It looks like a stain.

When she was a kid, she'd spilled orange juice on the sofa cushion, and you know you don't spill orange juice on sofa cushions because mommies hate stains, so she did what every kid her age would do: she turned over the cushion and her mother was none the wiser. Kids learn how to clean up their mess early in their childhood — Miriallia learned it when she was five and she'd turned over three couch cushions by the time she was five-years-and-two-months old. She was a smart girl when she was a kid.

She grips the edges of her vanity table, but she can't turn over furniture so she buries the box under all the junk in her drawer instead. No evidence of stains. No one gets mad. Everybody wins.

At seven o'clock in the evening, her doorbell rings, and her feet carry her to her door. She just knows who's on the other side. He's always on time, works like clockwork. He's routine and stable. She needs him.

"Dearka."

"I brought you M&Ms. Weren't you craving for these yesterday?"

She smiles because he remembers, and he's sweet like that. But there's no time for chocolates because at seven-thirty, he has to leave. She deposits the bag of M&Ms on the kitchen counter, beside the coffee pot with the untouched brew, and she supposes it's funny that one is bitter and the other is sweet but they both fit. They belong on her kitchen counter.

But there's no time for silly contemplation either, and she pads over to her bedroom and removes her clothes unceremoniously. When he kisses her, she forgets what day it is, and they tumble onto the bed in a tangle of limbs and familiar flesh. There are no secrets: she knows the slope of his neck, the planes of his torso, the feel of him under her hands. He's smooth where he's not scarred, where the war failed to imprint its mark.

There is no gentleness, however: her nails leave scratches on his chest, his mouth leaves bruises on her lips, and he fucks her with abandon but ends up letting her ride him to completion because she's clawing at him to make him acknowledge the selfishness in her that dictates her to take and take and take.

Thirty minutes later, he's showered and out the door, and she's still catching her breath under the sheets. She remembers the black box in her drawer and remembers, too, that she doesn't like M&Ms.

* * *

Smoking is an addictive hobby that kills, like piloting, except smoking starts to kill twenty years after the vice is dropped. Piloting, on the other hand, kills in a second, and it's bloody, and it's violent, and it isn't like smoking at all. There are no delicate tendrils of smoke but puffs of black clouds upon the crash, and it isn't very nice. It's artless.

Smoking, she opines, is better than piloting. By a half margin at least.

She goes about her day like usual, and the camera in her hands is heavy and warm. She likes looking at the viewfinder and seeing the crosshair focus on a subject. It's like looking at the world from a different perspective, a few adjustments and the view is blurry, and it's perfect because a clear picture is like the makings of a lie. It shows too much of what shouldn't be shown — blemishes, wrinkles, other faults. And then it's going to be digitally enhanced and becomes, ultimately, a lie. It's perfect, but perfection is overrated so she keeps her blurry images and she thinks they're better.

Her boss tells her to redo the shoot.

Before heading home, she passes by a convenience store. She hates the fluorescent lighting, they hurt her eyes, but she can't change it because it's a fact of life, like stale coffee and sex. They're just there.

There is no one else in the store and the guy at the register ignores her as she stands on the cigarette aisle. There are so many choices, but she's looking for Marlboros, the ones packaged in white, filtered. They won't kill her right away. Twenty years and then some more, and it's not like fighting in a war at all.

She reaches out a hand towards the stack of Marlboros and then picks up a blue pack of Dunhill Fine Cut instead. The color is pretty, shiny, and maybe, if the light of the sun hits it just right, she can take a picture of it.

When she gets home, no one is there and it only means that she has her night alone. It's okay, it's been like that for how many years anyway. There's something comforting in things that don't change because if they don't change, they don't become memories, and if they don't become memories, she doesn't have to remember them all the time. They're just there, like gratuitous sex and shameless flirting, and they're all right.

She takes the coffee pot and grimaces at the stale coffee then quickly drains it in the sink. After washing the pot and returning it to its place, she fishes the pack of cigarettes from her purse and deposits it on the counter, beside the bag of M&Ms and the percolator. The three subjects don't match, and they stain the white of the countertop.

The pack remains unopened.

* * *

Dinner with friends on Sunday nights is a tradition, or as traditional as it gets after seven months of having it regularly. She thinks it's just an activity. They call it tradition. Just one of the things that you do, like brushing your teeth after dinner, or putting one foot in front of the other again and again, or making strong coffee on Wednesday afternoons. But she likes it enough, so tradition it is, and it's always better than seeing the Sunday paper on her hallway table after she's picked it up from the porch. She hates the Sunday paper, but the lady from across the street always smiles a greeting at her when she goes out the door to retrieve it, a crooked smile, like a grandmother's smile, and she supposes that even if she hates the Sunday paper, it's all right. Perhaps that's tradition, too.

Someone asks what everyone's been up to, and it's a silly game. Nobody voices that out, however, and for a split second, Miriallia wonders if she's the only one who thinks like that. But it's always asked, every Sunday night after placing their orders, so maybe it really is a game, like Monopoly, where you play it again and again until you have many green houses and red hotels, and you've gone to jail more times than you can count. Or are they red houses and green hotels? She can't remember; she hasn't played in a while.

Dearka sits next to her, solid and real, and the light makes a halo out of his hair. If the sun shines like that on him on Wednesday afternoons, perhaps she'll take a picture.

Dearka never comes around on Wednesday afternoons.

"How's your day?" he asks, giving her knee a gentle squeeze under the table. He's sweet like that, asking her how she's faring because they don't see each other on Sunday mornings.

"The usual. I had negatives developed."

When her order arrives, she takes her fork and eats her mesclun salad.

"Do you want to come over?" Sunday nights, as a general rule, are never to be spent alone.

"Do you want me to come over?" he answers.

"Yes."

"Okay."

She finishes her food and decides she dislikes it.

The following Sunday, she orders another mesclun salad and invites Dearka to spend the night with her again.

Tradition, she surmises, is an excuse to keep the status quo.

* * *

In the course of several weeks, interrupted by Sunday dinners and Wednesday afternoon coffees, she's managed to keep her life as steady as a stream, which doesn't make sense at all but there's no other way to describe it and she's perfectly okay with that. She now also hates the number twenty-three for no other reason than it seems like the perfect number to hate, and peanut butter because it has peanuts to which most people are allergic; she isn't, but she stays away from the stuff on general principle.

The best part, however, was how she managed to get herself fired: She submitted photos of children playing — bright, vivid colors of red and blue and green on otherwise out-of-focus images. No lines were definitive, and edges bled out in contrasting spikes — they were all indistinct. She thought they were brilliant. Her boss thought it was time to let her go.

Perfection is a fucking cliché. And she refuses to think of the perfect ring in perfect silver finish ensconced in a perfect black velvet box in her drawer, sitting perfectly beneath a pile of pencils, and paper, and inkwells, and what have you.

There's a new bag of M&Ms by the percolator (the previous one had to be disposed of); an additional pack of cigarettes beside the unopened Dunhills — Sobranie Classic Lights, and she thinks it's ridiculously expensive for a pack of smokes; she bought one without hesitation anyway (if she's going to kill herself with a vice, might as well go about it with class, like an artist's prerogative, sort of) — and a _Peter Pan_ book that's still in its plastic covering. Dearka gave it to her last week when she said in passing that she'd like to read it. She likes that he tries; it's really sweet.

She traces a finger over the reflection of the lights on the shiny green cover of the book, or maybe that's the plastic playing with the deflexion of the sun's ray from the window. It's really pretty, and perhaps she would take a picture. Later. Because she still hates the coffee she's brewed, the new bag of M&Ms, the cigarettes, and now the book.

Just as well. She hates cats and her vanilla shampoo and the Sunday paper anyway, and they're still very much there.

Before the day is over, at seven o'clock sharp, there is a knock on the door, and she has no doubts as to who's standing on the other side. Seven o'clock is Dearka, and she neglects thinking about what that makes of him. She still needs him after all, and he's still the man whom the light favors with a halo, and she still hasn't snapped a photo of him yet.

* * *

When Miriallia slips the ring on the third finger of her right hand on another Wednesday afternoon then brews a strong pot of coffee in the kitchen, she feels like she's gotten up on the wrong side of the bed, which perhaps is quite likely because she always sleeps on the left side. The faint sunlight still streams through the window to hit the ring just right, the muffled noise of the outside is still the same, she still hates a certain pair of shoes in her shoe cabinet (a pair she will still wear because she has always done so in the past), and she still hates M&Ms (especially the red ones), but the feeling of something amiss remains. It's like stepping into a room full of people and the conversations stop — you instinctively know that something's not right, and true enough, when you look at yourself, you're as naked as the day you were born. Except she's as clothed as possible, and the cotton is warm on her skin, and she still hates the Sunday paper and the painting in her living room that just won't stay unsloped.

It feels like an itch, an irritating itch, but she supposes that it requires too much elbow grease to soothe, and frankly, she needs both hands to operate the coffee machine: one to press the button and one to feel the percolator rumble to life. There's only so much one person can do at a time, and right at this moment, brewing coffee is more important than trying to figure out how the world works, or how it doesn't work, whichever means less fuss.

The sounds of the shower don't break the stilted stillness of the afternoon, but they do bring her attention to the two untouched pack of cigarettes on the countertop; she doesn't quite understand why the muted pitter-pattering of the shower leads her attention to such a disconnected subject, but she's still feeling the rumble of the machine under her palm and doesn't have much energy to ruminate on the why of another.

It's almost like an unconscious effort to reach for the pack of gaspers, like it's natural to want them after brewing the strong coffee no one is going to drink. And then she pauses because although she's decided that what's going to kill her has an artist's approval of sorts, the blue of the Dunhill pack catches her attention. It's frosty, kind of like ice, and then she considers again taking a photo while the sun still streams nicely through her window. Just as quickly, she hesitates. The frost will probably melt under the light of the camera, and it doesn't come to her that the sun might be doing exactly that. Maybe that's what's been bothering her since she put on the ring at the start of the afternoon.

She supposes she hates her camera now, too, because it will melt the frosty blue of the pack of smokes she hates just as much, if not more. Perhaps it's not going to be smoking that's going to kill her after all; indecision really is a bitch and maybe that would do her in, except she's not really indecisive because she's quite decided that she hates cigarettes, hates the _Peter Pan_ book, hates the mesclun salad she routinely orders, the annoying cats, the Sunday paper, and fuck, she still can't figure out what's so wrong with today. Maybe the planets are aligned…but shouldn't that translate to good things? Fucking astronomy, she doesn't know what she's talking about, and _fuck_, why is Dearka standing in her kitchen?

He looks at her strangely, but what comes out of his mouth is stranger, "Is that coffee I smell?"

"Want a cup?" Of course not. Why would Dearka want something that nobody likes? She might as well have offered him the number twenty-three if it weren't so incorporeal.

"Sure," he smiles.

For a moment, she's frozen on her spot because Dearka can't have said what he just said. It doesn't make sense. It's like putting two and two together and getting five. Maybe piloting really is less fatal than smoking.

"Miriallia, are you all right?"

"Of course." She takes two cups from the cupboard and fills them with the bitter coffee, and when Dearka asks for cream and sugar, she thinks astronomy really is a fucking pain in the ass.

The manner with which he spoons sugar and cream into his coffee is unconsciously lazy, an insouciant declaration of leisure. It clashes with the ring on her finger, the smooth to its awkward. It's different. And the brew in Dearka's cup is caramel.

Today, she decides, she hates astronomy. She also hates coffee that should be black but isn't.

Dearka glances at the gubbins on her counter, sweeping unreadable eyes over the bag of M&Ms, the packs of cigarettes, the _Peter Pan_ book that's still untouched, and the sketchpad, still in its plastic, that he gave her the other day because she told him in passing that she'd like to try sketching. She braces herself against the onslaught of questions she knows must be coming any second now because that's what happens, isn't it? When you do something that isn't supposed to be done, other people question you, not necessarily to right a wrong, but maybe just to follow the grand scheme of things. Keep things routine. And it's all right because it has always been done. It's safe. It's _familiar_.

"Why does Wednesday have to be different?" he asks, and shit, that isn't what she's expecting at all. She needs to go back to bed and get up once more, but this time, on the _right_ side of it.

And Wednesday isn't different from the other days of the week anyway. It's the same as Monday, or Thursday, or Saturday, and really, it's the spelling that's only different, but no two days can have the same spelling anyway — Thursday can't be Wednesday because it doesn't make sense to have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Wednesday, and Wednesday again until Sunday, because Sunday is the night reserved for asking what everyone has been up to even though nothing big has actually happened to each of them. Sunday is for Monopoly and mesclun salad and asking Dearka over.

"What do you mean?"

He seems to be looking at her ring, but that can't be because he doesn't even know whose it is or what it's for. And girls really just have to have jewelry some odd days.

"Wednesday is a like a taboo between us. There's always so much effort in your part to keep me away on Tuesday nights so I won't be here on Wednesdays, at least until the evening. Last night—last night, you must have been really drunk to let me stay over, and I'm right, aren't I? About Wednesdays? Because you've been acting off since I stepped inside your kitchen." He still doesn't say anything about the things on her counter, and she can't decide whether that's better or not.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

A pause. "Right, then." He finishes his coffee, leans towards her to brush a chaste kiss on her lips, and bids her goodbye. Nothing criminal. Nothing scathing. Just sweetened coffee on her lips.

Dearka doesn't come to her the following days. There is no seven o'clock. There is no inviting over during Sunday nights. There is no halo of sunlight, and there is suddenly a ripple in her routine.

Dearka tells them he has an assignment out of town. And it's a lie, but it's okay because lies are normal…except, maybe, it isn't so okay after all.

She decides she hates Wednesday afternoons, and the perfect ring remains hidden in its perfect box under bottles of rouge, and memory cards, and stilted how-do-you-dos.

Her fingers itch for a nicotine stick they aren't familiar with.

* * *

Miriallia hasn't slept well in the two weeks that followed her decision to hate Wednesdays, and she thinks that she should stop brewing black coffee as well. It's not like she drinks it anyway, and it only gets more annoying because she almost always finds herself reaching for the cream and sugar even when she hates coffee that's black and coffee that's not black. In the end, however, she still finds herself plugging the percolator and brewing coffee, the light streaming through her window, warming her skin, and the glint of metal is absent because the ring is still in its box.

She surveys her kitchen and notices the many things she's deposited on the counter over the weeks: a book, a sketch pad, a bag of M&Ms, cigarettes, little knick knacks she doesn't really have much reason to have. And all untouched. All desired at one point in time only to be left unwanted soon after because the initial desire wasn't even real, only echoes of something from the past, of someone — he who had bright eyes and an even brighter smile, alive but…_not_, because he's dead, it's the past, and she _should have_ moved on a long time ago.

He had black wavy hair that she used to love carding her fingers through.

No, wait, that's not right. He had _brown_ hair. Brown hair, not black, certainly not blonde…because blonde is the present and brown belongs in the past…except there is no blonde right now because he's gone away, out of town…out on an _assignment_, he says.

For the first time in a long while, Miriallia feels her chest tighten with an emotion she hasn't felt in a long time. So long it was that she can't even remember what it's called.

She turns off the percolator even when the coffee hasn't finished brewing yet, shuffles towards her living room, and picks up the phone with a shaky hand and shakier breathing. She watches her fingers dial a number she hasn't called before, oddly disconnected with the experience, like it isn't her fingers that are going through the motions.

Seven rings in her ear before the machine picks up.

"_Either I'm out or I'm pretending to be. Leave a message after the beep, yeah?"_

As if a dam has been broken, she begins to cry in earnest, wishing she could stop but couldn't because the first teardrop has fallen and the others can't be held back. "Dearka…I don't like— I never— Black coffee. I don't like black coffee. And you can come over on Wednesdays, it's okay, really. It's not— It's not different from the other days. It's just that, you see, I hate red M&Ms and I haven't taken a photo of you yet with the halo thing. Please… Please don't hate me…"

Disjointed thoughts, broken by sobs, emphasized by incoherency, and she herself thinks she isn't making any sense at all. Like wanting to smoke but not really.

* * *

It's a Saturday, that isn't a Wednesday before Sunday dinners that are a tradition, when a familiar sequence of raps on the door echoes throughout the house, the sound oddly stentorian in the stillness of the day. She automatically looks at the clock and notes that it isn't seven o' clock in the evening, but she's sure that the one knocking on her door is Dearka…even if Dearka is seven o' clock and it's only four in the afternoon, a time she doesn't think she dislikes.

It's been three days since her call, the first of which she spent alternating between crying and getting mad for having to explain herself; the second, unfeeling; and now, right up until she fell asleep and woke up to the sounds of knocking, wondering if maybe she ought to throw out the packs of cigarettes on her kitchen counter.

She unlocks the door with her heart in her throat, half afraid to see Dearka on the other side of the door and half afraid that she wouldn't. And just before she turns the knob, she notices the pair of shoes she hates resting by the door and remembers the taste of M&Ms on her tongue when she licks her suddenly dry lips. Now that's odd.

"Are you all right?" comes Dearka's concerned tone as soon as the door opens, his eyes roving over her as if trying to spot some kind of injury on her person.

Miriallia frowns. Shouldn't Dearka sound more…agitated…or resigned maybe? Surely not concerned. Not after her neglect and selfishness. She turns her head and checks whether the week-old Sunday paper on her hall table is still there. It is, so maybe Dearka's concern isn't so out of place after all.

"Yes, of course. Why?"

Dearka pauses, looking confused. And then he runs a hand through his hair, taking a deep breath, before he crosses the threshold and takes Miriallia's hands. "What's going on with you, Miriallia? I've tried and tried and I still can't understand."

Miriallia lets herself be steered towards the couch where Dearka sits her. He takes a seat on the coffee table facing her. He kisses her hands and asks once more what's wrong with her, and that's when everything comes rushing back: the denial, the detachment, and then the panic that is so distant from the two previous pre-occupations. The painting that won't stay upright, the cats, number twenty-three, and vanilla shampoo. Mesclun salad and Monopoly and Sunday assignations.

A fighter plane and a bright smile that is no more.

And in a sudden moment of lucidity, she takes Dearka's hands in hers and whispers, "I need help."

* * *

It's not so bad, talking to the man in the white coat and severe black shoes, if you look past how boring he is, how blandly politic his voice is…or maybe it's soothing? She can't quite tell with people like him. He wears glasses and his salt-and-pepper hair is neatly brushed back from his forehead, and when he calls her name, she's reminded of her high school teacher. She tells him a lot of things, like brewed coffee and a perfect ring in a perfect velvet box, and for his part, he asks her a lot of questions.

Two weeks and a day into their sessions, she tells him of a boy who smiled so brightly and drank black coffee because it's what real men drink, right?

Two weeks and a half and she's talking about billowing black smoke and crying her heart out and a sharp knife in her hands.

Four weeks and she's talking about that someone she almost killed.

Seven weeks and two days and she's saying how that someone has become something more than a memory of a person she wanted dead because along the way, through shared laughter and secret miseries, he's become so important that it was he whom she ran to for help.

Ten weeks and she's on about throwing out the unnecessary items on her kitchen counter, all of which having something to connect her to that brown-haired pilot…a passing vice, a favorite book, and a papery pastime among other things.

Ten weeks and two days and she's acknowledging that she likes her coffee with cream but no sugar, caramel in color but never in taste, and her preference has nothing to do with the ghost of her past or the blinding smile of her present.

Eleven weeks and she's sharing that she really likes vivid images, clean and clear, but the memory of a plane crashing, the haziness of the casualty, of the smoke, of the fire, are staining her artistic preference.

It takes three months and a week before she finally walks out of the man's office without having to make another appointment.

* * *

When Sunday dinner comes around, Miriallia finds herself sitting next to Dearka, holding a menu open in front of her, and wondering what to get. It's so easy to order a mesclun salad, and the waiter even offers because it's what she always has — because it's routine. She looks at Dearka, but he's talking to someone else, and really, it's not like Dearka knows; she hasn't exactly told him anything. She's taking it a step at a time, like changing her vanilla shampoo to jasmine seven days ago then getting rid of the shoes she doesn't like three nights prior to today. Step one, step two, and other steps she has to do on her own because she needs to realize that she should help herself first before others can help her.

"No, I'll have the salmon," she replies, feeling oddly accomplished, as though she's run her third marathon and this time, she's won.

When the question about what everyone has been up to comes up, she smiles to herself and still thinks it's like a game of Monopoly: repetitive, driving through jail again and again, and strangely enough, entertaining, like gossip, only not as malicious.

At the end of the meal, Miriallia surprises herself when she invites them all back to her house and proposes a game of Monopoly. And when she brings the board game into the living room where everyone is gathered on the floor, she smiles to herself as she notes that she actually got it right: green for houses and red for hotels.

She asks Dearka to stay when the night is over because Sunday nights are, as always, not meant to be spent alone. It's always been that way and Dearka has never said no, and tonight isn't any different.

It's taken her this long, but she acknowledges that though she might hate the Sunday paper, she has nothing against Sunday nights because on Sunday nights, Dearka isn't only _seven o' clock_, isn't only a thirty-minute fuck, and from here on forward, won't only be a bed fellow to finish the week. And it's all good. So, yes, she likes Sunday nights, and she likes Dearka as well.

When Dearka kisses her as soon as the last of their friends leaves, Miriallia thinks that tradition may not be so bad after all.

* * *

It starts with a kiss, and then another, and then hands popping buttons and feeling the warm skin beneath the cloth, and for some reason, it all seems new, like she hasn't done this before, like the tan skin she's caressing and kissing is something she hasn't come across ever. But when he sucks in a sharp breath as she lets her hand wander past his belt, she remembers all the times she slept with him, all the times they fucked like rabbits — similar in that they fucked with the same passion that didn't go beyond what was physical. She feels her breath catch in her throat, saddened by time she wasted, but he's still there, he's still looking at her with such intensity, and he's still responding to her every touch…and that must count for something, right?

Dearka kisses the corner of her mouth, sliding silken lips across her cheekbone to her ear. "Shh, it's all right."

"I'm sorry…"

"I know." And before Miriallia can respond to that, Dearka is already kissing her, licking at her bottom lip to ask for entrance, and when he's granted it, he takes his time claiming her mouth, running his tongue on her palate, mapping every nook and cranny until he's teased her own into his mouth and making her thoughts stop forming coherently.

Dearka leads her to the bedroom, shedding clothing along the way and revealing more than skin — taking away the phantom sheen of the gaspers she hasn't really smoked, the charcoal stains of an art medium she hasn't had the chance to use on her sketchpad, and the whispers of the words of the book which plastic covering she hasn't removed. As he guides her to the bed and covers her body with his, she forgets the tastes of red M&Ms, and the wails of the neighborhood cats are a mere buzz in her ears that's negligible because the pounding of her blood is much louder, so much more consuming, fueling a fire that's coming from the inside.

Dearka kisses a path down her throat, laving the vale of her breasts with his tongue, playing her like a harp, soft and sharp at the same time, and her nerves are singing with the gloriousness of it all. With nothing to hold her back, she lets herself _feel_, and despite the haze Dearka is fast putting her in, she finds herself surprised to understand just how intimate this thing is…this sleeping with Dearka…this kind of lovemaking that somehow is just above the normal fucking.

When Dearka takes her, there is no hurry to reach an orgasm, there is no frantic need to get things over. There's just making her forget where he ends and she begins, and when they both peak, Miriallia forces back a sob at how good it feels to finally let go.

The next morning, early and chilly and barely bright, Miriallia wanders into her living room and spies at the painting that has once again manages to be off-kilter. It doesn't take long for her to decide to fish her camera from her room — careful, careful because Dearka's still sleeping, and his hair, unkempt and in need of a cut, looks wonderful splayed on her pillow, yellow on maroon, and perhaps she'd take a picture of Dearka with the morning sun in his hair later — and she smiles at the familiar weight of the equipment in her hands.

The sunset in her living room has run its life, but it's not the sunrise she has in mind. She passes by the hallway table, and for the first time, feels the impulse to check the Sunday paper she hadn't wanted to browse yesterday or any other day before today, and there on the Lifestyle section, the artist's portion of that section, is a photograph of the docks taken by someone she doesn't know, and the regret of fucking up her job creeps up on her, reminding her of chances she took for granted, of her dislike of cats, and the number twenty-three, and peanut butter she still thinks she doesn't like, of fancies that didn't take flight and smoky mirrors she has yet to clean.

Of messy blonde locks and white coats.

She looks over her shoulder, as if to assure herself that her bedroom door is still closed and in it is her present waiting to be kissed awake. As she puts down the paper, she remembers a different kind of opportunity. The one that's allowing her to start over. It puts another smile on her face.

It's a new day, and on the side of cobbled path leading to her welcome mat outside the house is a single flower that manages to survive the heat of the stone, waiting for the flash of her camera because unlike the frosty blue of the Dunhill pack, the flower isn't going to melt.

She squares her shoulders, clutches her camera to her chest, and opens the door.

* * *

The afternoon of Tolle's death anniversary, Miriallia places a single lily on his headstone and a kiss in the air. A prayer on a windy Wednesday afternoon, an ode, but a goodbye all the same. On her finger is the perfect ring which she now understands the reason for wearing: It's not to keep her imprisoned to her past but to remember that her past wouldn't want her to be stuck in a never-ending cycle of regret. It's a beautiful ring, and it deserves to be worn, and Dearka says that it's all right because Tolle will always be a part of her.

When she returns to the car, Dearka greets her with a chaste kiss and a question so incongruously sincere in its casualness, "You all right?"

Miriallia turns around and looks up at the path she came down from: There is no one else at the memorial garden, the quiet broken only by the incessant whistles of the wind as it sweeps over the green grass, forcing the blades into a dance that makes Miriallia itch to take a photo, and maybe, someday, she will.

At this distance, she can't anymore see Tolle's grave, and the absence of it from her line of sight is like the finalization of her farewell from earlier. This time around, the words don't taste like ash in her mouth.

This is it.

This is the last part.

This is where it's finally, _finally_, going to be about moving on.

Taking a deep breath, she returns her attention to Dearka and smiles. "Never better."

_-fin_

Citation/s:

Echoes of angles who won't return – _Everything You Want_ by Vertical Horizon

This is written for Dark Knight (request from a review of _Play of the Fates_). I don't know if s/he's reading this because the reviewer was not logged in then and I've no way to contact him/her, but anyway, s/he requested for a Miriallia/Dearka story, and here it is.


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